Since it's a nearly certain reality of life, I simply have to integrate that into my business plan.

We all know that if you have something manufactured in the U.S. it's likely to miss its market window. OTOH, if you have it manufactured in Asia, where the quality is high, but the attitudes toward intellectual property are different, you'll almost certainly have a competitor within a few weeks, who's copied your circuitry, stolen your PCB artwork, and cloned your documentation and packaging. He focuses his sales in areas where you don't, of course. You won't know about it, of course, until you find out that AVNET has sold 20K units, for all of which you now have RMA's out, though you've actually only manufactured 2K units.

If you want to prevent that, you have the boards made in China, the assembly done in Korea, and the programming of all programmable parts done in the U.S. after everything is tested in Malasia, or somewhere else where they have the technology to do the testing automatically. If you're really paranoid, you can have the boards built but not routed and silkscreened in one place, and the routing and silkscreening done elsewhere.

That way you can capitalize on the Asian quality control policy, consisting of "commit one mistake and you become spare parts for some physically sick, but financially healthy westerner."

RE